Seize the Means of Community

How a democratic socialist mayor may be using government not only to deliver benefits, but to help New Yorkers become participants in democratic power

The Bully Classroom

An aspect of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty may be becoming clearer now that the novelty of electing a democratic socialist mayor has begun to wear off.

Mamdani may be treating the mayoralty—perhaps especially his first term—as something like a bully classroom.

A politician with a bully pulpit has an unusually prominent platform from which to persuade. A politician occupying a bully classroom would be doing something more ambitious: using the experience of government itself to change the way people understand their relationship to government.

Mamdani has repeatedly described democratic socialism as extending democracy beyond elections, “from the ballot box to the rest of our lives.” Successful municipal government can certainly demonstrate that socialism is less frightening and more practical than its opponents suggest. Free childcare, improved public services and other tangible accomplishments can show that a socialist administration is capable of making ordinary life better.

But demonstrating democratic socialism is not the same thing as teaching people what it means to practice it.

Demonstration says: Here is what a democratic-socialist government can do for you.

Teaching goes further. It changes what people understand democratic government to be—and who they understand themselves to be in relation to it.

Americans have largely been trained to encounter government as beneficiaries, clients or customers. Government acts and we receive. We judge it by what it delivers and periodically vote for the people who will administer it. Even an ambitious progressive government can leave that relationship essentially intact while promising to deliver considerably more.

A democratic socialism that really extends democracy into the rest of our lives suggests something different. Its purpose cannot simply be to make government a more generous provider. It must also make people increasingly capable of participating in the processes through which their common lives are governed.

There is an old adage, often misattributed to ancient China: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Its moral is supposed to be that individual capacity is preferable to continued dependence upon someone else’s provision.

But it leaves out a third possibility: transform the community into a fishing village.

The point would then be neither simply to distribute fish nor merely to produce more self-sufficient fishermen. It would be to build the relationships, institutions, shared knowledge and material capacities through which people can provide for themselves together.

Democratic socialism, at its most ambitious, belongs to that third category.

The question changes from simply What will government do for us? to What can we become capable of doing together?

The $10,000 Problem

That distinction helps make sense of what might otherwise look like one of the strangest decisions of Mamdani’s young administration.

New York City’s roughly 26,000 school paraprofessionals are among its lowest-paid public employees. Many work directly with children with disabilities. Starting salaries are around $32,000. The City Council unanimously passed legislation providing them with $10,000 payments. Their union, the United Federation of Teachers, strongly supports the measure. Mamdani himself campaigned on raising paraprofessional compensation.

Yet his administration has gone to court to block the law.

If socialism means principally that government should redistribute more resources toward poorly paid workers, the position seems almost perverse. Workers need the money. Their union wants them to receive it. The Council has provided it. Why would a democratic socialist mayor stand in the way?

Mamdani’s administration says paraprofessionals should indeed be paid substantially more, but that compensation must be determined through collective bargaining. “We will not allow the political process to replace the collective bargaining table,” his spokesman said.

That argument becomes more intelligible if we remember what unions were originally for.

Workers organized unions because individually they possessed little power over the terms of their employment. By combining, they could formulate demands together, confront an employer collectively and, ultimately, withhold their labor. The achievement of unionism was therefore never merely that workers received better wages and benefits. They created an organized capacity to act upon the conditions of their own lives.

In the language of the fishing adage, the union was a way of building the fishing village.

But unions themselves do not necessarily retain that character. Collective bargaining can become something professional officers and staff periodically conduct on members’ behalf. Members pay dues, representatives negotiate, a contract appears and workers judge whether the resulting package is satisfactory. The union may still obtain substantial benefits, but the member can once again experience herself principally as their recipient.

The fishing village can become a fishing service.

That qualification is crucial to understanding Mamdani’s position. Collective bargaining is not inherently democratic merely because it is called collective bargaining. Its democratic-socialist value depends upon the extent to which workers themselves acquire an organized, continuing and consequential capacity to participate in determining the conditions under which they work.

And that makes the paraprofessional dispute more complicated than a simple opposition between legislation and bargaining.

The UFT itself sought the Council legislation. Organized labor is not standing passively by while benevolent politicians hand workers $10,000. The union has exercised its own political power to obtain that result. Mamdani is insisting that compensation should instead be pursued through another channel of worker power: collective bargaining.

The real question, then, is not whether workers should exercise collective power. It is how that power should be organized, through what channels, and with what consequences for workers’ capacity to act again tomorrow.

Because New York has roughly 150 municipal bargaining units, the answer may extend far beyond paraprofessionals. If compensation that proves difficult to obtain through bargaining can instead be obtained from the Council, unions, legislators and future administrations will adjust accordingly. Expectations will change. Bargaining strategies will change. The institutional environment of future negotiations will itself be altered.

That does not prove Mamdani right.

The UFT can reasonably argue that existing bargaining practices have themselves helped perpetuate intolerably low paraprofessional pay. If the bargaining system has failed these workers, using organized political power to force a correction may represent collective agency rather than an evasion of it. An institution does not become democratic merely because labor law has assigned it a particular function.

But that is what makes the controversy interesting.

The democratic-socialist question cannot be answered simply by asking which side will give workers more. Nor can it be answered by declaring one institutional procedure intrinsically correct. It requires asking which arrangements make workers more capable of acting together upon the circumstances of their lives.

From Benefits to Power

That is a much harder political lesson than “socialists want workers to have more money.”

American electoral politics encourages people to think of themselves as consumers choosing among competing packages of benefits. Politicians promise things; citizens reward or punish them according to what they deliver. A progressive government can greatly improve the package while leaving citizens substantially as spectators and recipients.

Mamdani’s language about democracy beyond the ballot box points toward another possibility.

Government, in this conception, becomes not merely the institution that acts on behalf of people but part of the infrastructure through which people become capable of acting together. A democratic-socialist administration would therefore be judged not only by what it delivers but by whether the people it governs acquire greater capacity to participate consequentially in their common life.

A government can improve workers’ wages without increasing workers’ collective power. It can build housing for tenants without strengthening tenants’ capacity to organize. It can provide excellent public services while leaving the public as passive consumers of those services. All of those accomplishments may be valuable. But they do not by themselves constitute an expansion of democracy.

The more ambitious project is to transform beneficiaries into participants.

And participation here means considerably more than being invited to meetings or asked for opinions. It means becoming part of organized relationships through which one can actually affect what happens.

This is also why the paraprofessional dispute is politically dangerous for Mamdani. A $10,000 payment is immediate and concrete. Institutional capacity is comparatively abstract. A poorly paid worker cannot reasonably be expected to accept a lecture about the integrity of collective bargaining in place of desperately needed income.

Mamdani therefore has to deliver the other half of his argument. If his administration defends the bargaining process but fails to obtain substantially better and durable compensation for paraprofessionals, the distinction collapses into proceduralism. Participation without consequential power is not much of a democracy.

But if the administration can improve compensation while strengthening workers’ capacity to determine their conditions collectively, the episode teaches something more interesting than the proposition that a socialist mayor supports unions.

It teaches people to look beyond what government gives them and ask what forms of power they possess together.

A Civic Apprenticeship

Calling Mamdani’s mayoralty a bully classroom should not imply that the mayor possesses the answers while eight million New Yorkers sit at their desks taking notes. If the project is genuinely democratic, the teaching must itself be reciprocal and contested. The UFT may turn out to understand this dispute better than City Hall. Unions, Council members, neighborhood organizations, public employees and ordinary residents will sometimes teach the administration rather than the reverse.

The point is that governing can itself become a kind of civic apprenticeship.

Conflicts expose institutions that normally remain invisible. Different forms of power become perceptible. People discover what they can and cannot accomplish through them. One struggle changes the conditions under which the next takes place. Over time, expectations about government—and about citizenship itself—can change.

Mamdani’s bully classroom, understood this way, is not primarily teaching New Yorkers a definition of democratic socialism. It is potentially teaching them a different political grammar.

Government need not be something standing above society, periodically dispensing benefits to individuals below. Workers need not appear merely as people deserving better treatment. Citizens need not understand democracy principally as the right to choose who will govern them.

They can begin instead to understand themselves as participants in the continuing work of governing their common life.

If that is indeed part of what Mamdani is attempting, then his first term has an objective that will not appear on any checklist of campaign promises.

He is not simply trying to show New Yorkers what democratic socialism can do for them.

He may be trying to help them build the political equivalent of a fishing village.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.